Review

""A smart business book detailing some vicissitudes of retailing, wrapped in a vivid biography of an engaging tycoon."" -- Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2007

""If (Conor O'Clery's) compelling narrative becomes a blue-print for future efforts to record the life stories of philanthropists, then the reading public might become far more aware of the major donors who have existed in their midst. O'Clery's account of how Charles `Chuck' Feeney rose from a blue-collar New Jersey neighbourhood to immense riches as founder of global retail enterprise, Duty Free Shoppers, and then gave almost every cent away, reads like a cross between a whodunnit and an airport business guru book."" -- Philantropy UK, December 2007

""You may never read a book as uplifting as Conor O'Clery's ""The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune"" In vivid, unvarnished prose, ""The Billionaire Who Wasn't"" recounts Feeney's meteoric rise from blue-collar beginnings in Elizabeth, N.J., to a perch as one of America's titans of commerce, head of Duty Free Shoppers, the largest liquor retailer in the world."" -- Washington Post's Express, November 6, 2007

Product Description

In 1988 Forbes Magazine hailed Chuck Feeney as the twenty-third richest American alive. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a blue-collar Irish-American family during the Depression, a veteran of the Korean War, he had made a fortune as co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world's largest duty-free retail chain. But secretly, Feeney had already transferred all his wealth to his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies. Only in 1997, when he sold his duty free interests, was he ""outed"" as one of the greatest and most mysterious American philanthropists in modern times. A frugal man who travels economy class and does not own a house or a car, Feeney then went ""underground"" again, until he decided in 2005 to cooperate in a biography to promote giving-while-living. Now in his mid-seventies, he is determined his foundation should spend the remaining $4 billion in his lifetime. The Billionaire Who Wasn't is a tale of one of the greatest untold retail triumphs of the twentieth century, and of what happens to a unique man and his family when confronted with wealth beyond imagining.